Bigger jars for the top shelf

The next firing is probably a week away, with a bunch of mugs (and other pots) yet to be thrown in the next few days. Should have a group of the collaborative pots Kim Medeiros and I have been working on, as well as some tall jars from my own wheel.
Kim and I have worked in the past couple of weeks on estuary-related pots for a summer 2013 show at the Falmouth Art Center. We were invited to participate together by Suzy Bergmann, the center director. These pots - a wide, shallow platter and a tall jar - will reflect the flow of the water in our Cape estuaries and the life that lives in that flow. We're both pretty excited about both the work and the invitation.
The top photo is of the drying jars in my own studio; next one down is Kim with the estuary platter this morning, after she's finished the decoration. More detailed photos to follow, once these pieces are fired.

Waiting for Sandy and its wind ...

The wind is still rising here on Cape Cod, though Hurricane Sandy is still hundreds of miles south of us. It's a big storm, winds apparently reaching out more than 500 miles. It's gusting into the 30s here right now and the wind has driven the water south of Falmouth into rollers and whitecaps. High tide drove water up over some docks and low-lying beach roads, but that will no doubt get much worse in another seven or eight hours, as the winds rise and high tide returns.
These photos are from near the entrance to Falmouth's inner harbor, right on Vineyard Sound. No doubt by high tide tonight, I'd be good and wet standing in the same place.

I'm ignoring the storm for the moment and going to the studio to make room for Kim Medeiros and me to glaze pots tomorrow for next weekend's woodfiring in Truro.

Mid-morning on the water, raking the bottom

I set two wareboards of big teabowls in the sun this morning to dry. Then I loaded my kayak, paddle and clam rake onto the pickup and headed to Monument Beach. I know I said some months ago that I would post no more clamming pictures. Well ...
Sept. 12 was a brilliant, cool, blue sky kind of day, with temperatures in the high 40s early and in the 60s when Tammy, Mike and I got our boats into the water about 10:30 and began paddling to the other side of the small bay, to the muddy clam flats that adjoin Tobey Island.
I've written before that these days in September and October are some of the best here on this thin arm of land at the edge of the Atlantic. The summer folk have mostly gone home, there are few weekday tourists and the weather continues - barring hurricanes - to be what you see in the photos here. The blessing of being a self-employed potter is that I can ask the boss for a couple of hours off to take the kayak out to the flats on a pretty September morning.

And that's what I did today. 

And the pots did a good job of drying themselves. More coming this afternoon and tomorrow.

Photos: Mike and Tammy at work on the water.

Signs of the season on Cape Cod

This post is more or less an opportunity for me to get a photo of my cousin Wendy onto the blog, a picture taken by her mother or father probably around 1949. My younger brother Tom took a lot of time in the past few months and put together old family photos, dating back to around 1910. This is one of my favorites. It's Wendy and what are no doubt two of her father's catches that day, brought in from a beach on Martha's Vineyard.
The photo is a mark of late spring on Cape Cod and the Vineyard, when shoals of striped bass feed in shallow local waters on the far end of their annual migration from the Carolinas and south. Up here Roccus Saxatilis is called "striper." Down south it's often called "rockfish." Either way, a heavy fish, a good fighter and a good meal.
This time of year, we often take our food from the land and the water that surrounds it. We've eaten mussels, hardshell clams, bluefish, striper and squid in the past couple of weeks. Lettuce, peas, rhubarb, strawberries have all been harvested by this time. It's a good time of the year to live here; not too many tourists on the streets yet, but lots of good food.
Below Wendy and her two stripers, I've posted a 41-inch fish that came this morning from the waters of the Cape Cod Canal. Friends of ours have a friend who catches fish but doesn't eat them. So he unlocks our friends' garage door and puts whatever legal bass or blue he's caught into their refrigerator. This morning, I got the two bass from the early fishing. One went to our potter friend Kim Medeiros and her family and the other came here, to be scaled and filleted and eaten by us and other friends.
Dee's peonies are in bloom, another sign of June, and so that you don't think I've abandoned making pots, the lineup of shelves for this weekend's glazing and firing.

British slipware potters workshop on Cape Cod

British potters Hannah McAndrew and Doug Fitch (whose blogs are available in the roll of blogs on the right of this page) bring their 21st century take on traditionally decorated slipware pottery to the U.S. in April.

On the weekend of April 8-10, the Cape Cod Potters will sponsor the first in a series of three East Coast workshops by the two friends. The event will be in the Falmouth High School clay studio, on the weekend of April 8-10. It will cost $145 (members) and $165 (non-members) for the full weekend, including lunch each day. (Scholarships are always available for these workshops, and art students and faculty at the Falmouth school can attend for free.) McAndrew and Fitch continue on to another two-day workshop in Fredericksburg, Va., and then a single day in Shelby, N.C., before returning home.

The two potters are well-known in the United Kingdom and have become familiar to U.S. potters through their blogs. Both were part of "Clay and Blogs: Telling a Story," an international exhibition of potters' work last fall in Southern Pines, N.C. McAndrew lives in southern Scotland and Fitch in Devon, England.

McAndrew and Fitch work with earthenware clay, making functional pots that are decorated with liquid slip in patterns, manipulated surfaces, or images and words. The style dates back centuries, but each potter has brought his or her own contemporary touch to the work.

We'll post more information about the workshop as it develops. In the meantime, e-mail Hollis Engley at hatchvillepottery@comcast.net for reservations, directions and more information for the Cape Cod workshop, or call him at 508-563-1948. For the Virginia workshop, e-mail Dan Finnegan at danfinneganpottery@cox.net. For the North Carolina event, e-mail Ron Philbeck at ronpots2@yahoo.com. Also, look for postings on the workshops in the March and April issues of Ceramics Monthly and the spring issue of Clay Times.

Photos above include, top to bottom: Hannah McAndrew's mugs, Hannah herself, a big Doug Fitch jug, Doug himself with a freshly-thrown cider jar.